Answers

If you learn best via tutoring, try http://railsmentors.org (free, not sure about quality of mentors), http://learn.thoughtbot.com ($249/month, Ben and Chad are awesome), or use Clarity! Some of the Ruby folks on Clarity that I know and can recommend:

Reviews

Dan is an exceptional business partner, coach and advisor. I've been working with Dan for nearly a year and he's help transform my business from a simple idea into an intuitive and responsive revenue generating web app. I've always appreciated Dan's insightful feedback, data-driven decision making and most importantly his judgment. As an entrepreneur it’s easy to lose focus of your core business and waste time on perceived problems and superficial opportunities. Dan has a persistent, if not relentless, focus on real customer needs and articulated user feedback. He has an innate ability to identify simple, yet elegant solutions to technical challenges. I would highly recommend Dan as an advisor.

I could not recommend working with Dan more. As an early stage startup founder, Dan and his team at Thoughbot helped me scope and build the private beta for Thrively. Dan is extremely knowledgeable as an experienced Rails developer, but he has also been greatly supportive with product ideas and feedback as a beta tester. He has gone above and beyond the call of duty to help me not only build our beta, but also to help me learn web development skills myself so I can continue to make progress on my own.

As a cofounder of Acquaintable, we engaged Thoughtbot in the early stages of development to jump start development before we had a technical cofounder. Throughout the engagement process, Dan Croak was extremely thoughtful about our business. We wound up hiring a technical cofounder before moving forward with Thoughtbot, but Dan has continued to be supportive and helpful with a variety of issues. He is an expert Ruby developer, holds himself and his work to very high standards, and has a knack for relating to people and explaining complex concepts. I would
certainly like to work with Dan in the future and would recommend Thoughtbot to others.

Not often when you ask a question of a consultant, developer, or colleague do you get a useful answer; chat with Dan for a few minutes and you’ll get a solution. Even several months after Dan led the eight-week project to build the core of Stattleship, I still turn to Dan for his expertise, opinion, and judgement. If I needed to know the best way to architect a mobile app and could consult Apple or Dan, I’d ask Dan (and I have). If I needed to know a good restaurant and I had a choice between Yelp! and Dan, I’d still ask Dan. Stattleship owes much to Dan’s thoughtfulness and leadership.

Dan built the first version of the app that my company is based upon. He created a proof of concept FAST (2 weeks) by scoping the vision down to the most important elements (the "mvp") and using his technical expertise to implement it. What sets Dan apart is that he's not in the business of building software for the sake of building software. He focuses on *business goals* and helps one understand what needs to be accomplished on the technical side to reach them.

Dan served as my mentor for the first month of my apprenticeship at thoughtbot, inc. and as a trusted advisor for the duration of my time. Dan is an exceptional mentor and I learned more working with him for one month than previous work put together. His attention to detail, patience with questions, and deep technical knowledge were invaluable to me as I continued to learn Rails.

Additionally, Dan is an excellent consultant who cultivates solid client relationships, serving as a trusted thought partner not just with code decisions, but product design, and innovative workflow using agile methods. In my opinion, he also exhibits the most important (and at times rarest) consulting quality: unquestioned integrity.

Finally, Dan is fun to work with. During intense work-sessions, his capacity for levity and random discussion is unparalleled, which provides a great balance to work and improves productivity.

I highly recommend Dan as a colleague and consultant. I would welcome the opportunity to work with him again in the future.

I've worked with Dan a number of times, including on my startup, and have always been impressed with how thoughtful he is in approaching both technical and business challenges. Dan was instrumental in helping Shortbord focus on the features we should include in our web app as well as the features that we should leave out. His insistence on narrowing our focus not only saved us time and money during the development process, but it also made our web app significantly easier to use. I consider Dan to be a fantastic technical advisor and highly recommending getting to know Dan if you are contemplating building a web app or are interested in early stage businesses.

Dan is the most knowledgable Ruby on Rails programmer I know. He has written and committed code to the main Rails project, as well as numerous open source projects. Most of all, he helps lead a prominent Rails consulting agency in Boston that rivals 37signals. Dan is incredibly affable and selfless to boot - if that doesn't convince you to work with him, I'm not sure if anything ever will, and you're missing out.

It was a great pleasure and honor to work with Dan as the lead developer for Crowdtap. Dan is a natural leader who was deeply respected by all the developers on the team which is not surprising given his deep technical expertise, very humble approach to mentoring and outstanding communication skills. I really hope that I have a chance to work with Dan again in the future.

Dan took valuable time out of his busy schedule to help me out on a volunteer, open source project this week. Although he was working with developers he didn’t know at all, Dan was able to insure the volunteer development team used the highest engineering practice standards possible, and was able to teach the team a lot of new technical skills in a very short amount of time. It was a pleasure to work with Dan, and I hope to have another opportunity to work with him again someday!

Dan is one of the most business savvy developers I know. This translates into being able to interface perfectly with a client, figuring out exactly what their needs are, and keeping the rest of the dev team focused. Dan's skills are instrumental in getting a product to market successfully.